The Next Eco-Warriors (24 page)

Finally I was allowed to go back to sleep at my dorm the next morning, but I had to write a “self-criticism report.” Instead of criticizing myself for these actions, I wrote a report about the crucial need for environmental action by the government. They didn't like that very much, and so I gained a reputation for being a problematic student, one potentially having “dangerous links with the international community.”

These police investigations—there were others—never led anywhere, but I always treated it as an opportunity to talk with the government officials about the importance of conservation. And I knew from watching Greenpeace on TV that being arrested was an important part of the process. I wore those arrests like a badge of honor. I felt like I was already a part of Greenpeace, whether officially or not.

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IN YUNNAN, OUR ACTIVISM WASN'T DRAWING the attention of police, but of the national media. For several weeks, we rode in buses around the province meeting people. But northwest Yunnan, being rugged terrain, wasn't always the most hospitable place for a bus full of people. So from time to time, we would hike to remote villages to talk with the locals, or to Tibetan temples perched on mountaintops to meet with the lamas who lived there. Everywhere we went, the people were kind and warmhearted. We visited several villagers and were welcomed to dine and dance with them upon first meet.

In Deqin, a small town in the farthest northwest corner of Yunnan, right on the Tibetan border, we conducted social research on such issues as household income, child schooling, family structure, and so on. The encounters were eye-opening. Many villagers relied on collecting and selling pine mushrooms, which were being exported to Japan to earn extra income. It was a vivid example of how locals needed a healthy environment to sustain their own livelihood.

The local people lived largely in small villages, surrounded on every side by forest, and many had a deep knowledge of the land formed by decades of living there. They loved their forest and valued having it intact. But many people were also quite poor. Therefore, when local government advertised their
logging schemes as a way to generate extra revenue for the local economy, it could be misleading. And for the government-owned logging companies, it was always an easy argument to turn publicly owned forests into resources that would feed their profits.

We saw clear-cut sites where logging companies had stripped everything from the ground, leaving acres of scarred land in their wake. Local officials explained their decisions to allow logging on these lands, and they consistently told us the same things the villagers had: there was every economic incentive to treat the forest as a resource to be exploited, and little economic incentive to treat it as either a source of sustainable livelihood or an environmental heritage to be preserved. Local governments needed money to provide services, and logging was one of the few activities that brought in the money.

We met Long Yongcheng, a researcher of the Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys who had lived and studied the animals in their natural habitat for eight years. As a group of mostly city-dwellers, we felt it was important to not just look at the logging and complain about it, but also to learn as much as possible about the whole situation from people who knew much more about it. Long, having studied the monkeys for years, was a wealth of information to our group. He knew the wildlife and the habitat extremely well, but he was also someone who actually lived in the area, who had friends and connections in the community. A group of outsiders who were leaving after their three-week trip can still have a role to play, as we learned, but it is citizens with deep links in the community and the environment that can achieve the most impressive and lasting results.

After nearly three weeks of riding down roads in our bus, hiking over newly deforested alpine slopes, and stumbling up and down mountainsides, we headed back to Beijing, armed with knowledge of the issues particular to Yunnan, and ready to propose real solutions that would protect the environment and the people as well. The question at that point was, would anyone care or listen?

As it turns out, our journey had been a sensation in Beijing, and the central government had taken note of our time on the road. Media reports of our exploration in Yunnan were widespread, provoking a long-overdue national conversation about balancing China's need for economic development with the need to protect natural environments.

Shortly after our trip, the central government offered ten million dollars to the local prefecture to invest in their efforts to reduce poverty and announced that they would halt logging of old-growth forests in Yunnan. The following year, in 1997, after severe flooding in the Yangtze River region, the late Prime Minister Zhu Rongji ordered the immediate ban on logging of all natural forests across China. The Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys—and thousands more species—would be protected from the logging that was devastating them, and local people would benefit economically and environmentally.

For me, the whole experience reshaped much of my thinking about environmentalism and ecological activism. Environmental problems are complex, and so are their solutions. Protecting a single species of wildlife is easy for people to understand, but ultimately, I decided the goal must be more than simply securing a piece of forest for a few endangered monkeys—it must be a comprehensive effort to protect whole ecosystems, ensure the human and social development of local communities, and integrate those two worlds in
a way that improves both. Such solutions are never easy to find, but when they work, they are world changing.

Environmental activism, I concluded,
is
political activism. The two are inseparable. Political action is crucial to saving vibrant ecologies, because government is the one institution that can mediate the many different concerns of industry, citizens, and the land, the sea, and those that cannot speak for themselves—at least, not in our language. Activism, on the other hand, is knowing when to challenge governments. But the key is to know when to work hand in hand with both. Both techniques are necessary to successfully preserve fragile environments.

Today, as with the original Yunnan trip, my dream from the time I was a teenager still propels me. That unofficial Greenpeace office I started at fourteen years old finally, over a decade of work, became real when I helped establish the first Greenpeace office in Beijing and became the first Greenpeace staff person working in mainland China. The daring actions of those original Greenpeace activists all those years ago, which dazzled me as a child, still inspire me today. It shows how activism—committed, long-term, and fearless—can effect not just immediate change, but also transform the world for decades to come. I'm proud to be part of that change today, and hope that I can similarly inspire the next generation of Chinese environmental activists.

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Wen Bo is currently the China coordinator for Global Greengrants Fund
. Time Magazine
says his work to fuel an environmental movement in China has “lit sparks amid the darkness of public indifference.” He received a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation and is now investigating marine endangered species trade in East Asia, trying to save sea turtles, sharks, and coral species
.

Thirty-eight
Britain
Movement Builder

PHOTO BY ANDY RIDLEY

I WAS DESPERATE FOR A CIGARETTE. Booked for a hip replacement in two weeks time, I'd given up smoking under advice from my surgeon. I hadn't smoked for five months. But none of this seemed to matter now. Standing there looking at the skyline of Sydney, shock took over. The amazing project that had become Earth Hour had succeeded on its first attempt. The beautiful skyline was lit up, not by glittering office lights but instead by a full moon glistening off the harbor. A city not asleep but fully awakened to an issue that the government had claimed did not concern people or was only the domain of “greenies.”

I felt a friendly hand on my shoulder. It was my good friend Phil McLean. “Don't forget to breathe it in,” he said. “Just take a couple of minutes.” We were standing down by Fleet Steps in the Botanic Gardens, looking across a dark city, far away from the Earth Hour event in order to see it all. For months, my world had been a buzz of hectic preparations, and it wasn't until now that I'd had a chance to appreciate exactly what we were doing.

It was hard to believe that such a simple idea had taken off in such a big way in Sydney, when earlier there were walls of resistance to our fight. That same year, 2007, the Australian government would not even refer to the issue as climate change. Officially to them it was “climate variability,” not necessarily human-made. This government was not only skeptical about climate change, but was also doing its best to stifle the science and the debate. This
wasn't the only roadblock. Around this time, it was dawning on some of us at the World Wildlife Fund that we were unable to connect to the public beyond a small percentage of people that we already knew. Our climate campaigns were failing. Yet the evidence grew stronger day by day. I knew then that we had to get out of our comfort zone and think again about how we approached not just the subject of climate change, but also, in its very essence, the subject of the planet.